Love is a Verb

The cave is the necessary portal we descend down into when our hearts are broken by disease, loss, and endings. It is the unavoidable Hadestown of transformational growth. It is the BOTTOM. It is the PORTAL. It is NOT HOME, but someplace more damp, dark, and mystical.

We meet the dark feminine in the cave that will require us to tell the truth to ourselves in ways we could not have imagined before we descended. It will require is to shed every last bit of armor we’ve been toting around, and crawl through the swamp of our own shadows.

This territory is necessary and true and when we love our people in the cave, it is almost as frightening as being in it, ourselves.

How do we do it? How do we love our people when they are in the cave?

I have no idea.

But a friend said today that love is a verb.

So it must mean that we are to BE here NOW, with grace and openness for our loved ones who are rolling around in their own shit and tasting their own darkest palettes. I think we don’t DO anything.

The action of love for the cave-dwellers (because we will be there again, alas, sometime down our own road) is to be the steady house-plant-rock-pillar of humanness.

To stay in yourself, and breathe, and dance and move and to carry the light of love that is free and waterlike for whenever they need small sips, that is it. That is all there is to be.

Advice-giving and judgment only ruin the small glimmers of light left in the cracks of the cave. There is no room for them here. Boundaries around how you can show up are true and important ways of loving your people who are in the cave. What can you be right now? What can’t you?

The only thing I know for sure is that we do arise from this portal place, if we can get gritty enough to eat shit into the breakthrough. And when we do, we will look at those who loved us in their steady waters, and hug them with stronger arms and more tender hearts.

Read more on Kelly's Substack, Poesia, here.